Week 01 · Overview

Week 1 Overview and Learning Objectives

Welcome to Week 1

Welcome. If you have never used an AI tool before, you are in exactly the right place. This program assumes no technical background. You do not need to know how to code, and you do not need to have followed the headlines. You only need to be willing to try.

This first week has one purpose above all others: to take something that may feel intimidating and make it ordinary. By the end of the week, AI will be a tool you have actually used, with your own hands, for your own work. That shift, from "something other people do" to "something I do," is the whole point of Week 1.

What this week covers

You will learn what today's AI tools are genuinely good at and where they fall short, so you approach them with clear eyes rather than fear or hype. Then you will create your own accounts on the two tools this program uses most, ChatGPT and Claude, and make them do real, useful work. You will also learn the ground rules for using AI responsibly, which protect both you and the people your work affects.

Learning objectives

By the end of this week you will be able to:

Explain, in plain language, what AI can and cannot do.
Create accounts and move confidently around the ChatGPT and Claude interfaces.
Apply responsible-use principles when you generate and review AI output.

How this week works

Every week in this program follows the same rhythm, so you always know what to expect. You start here on the overview. You work through the lectures, which are the core of the teaching. You use the reading and activity guide to put the ideas into practice. You watch the short videos. You take a knowledge check to confirm the ideas landed. And you finish by building something real. Same loop, every week, all the way to your final Career Launch Plan.

Time commitment

Plan for about five hours this week: roughly four hours of self-paced work you do on your own schedule, and one hour for the live question-and-answer session. You can spread the four hours across several short sittings. There is no penalty for going slowly.

What you will build this week

Your deliverable is the AI Tool Setup Verification. You will show that you have created working ChatGPT and Claude accounts, that you can navigate each one, and that you have completed a short set of guided first interactions. It is scored as Proficient or Not Yet Proficient. If you are not yet proficient, you may revise and resubmit once. The goal is simple: leave Week 1 holding a working set of tools and a first taste of what they can do.

A word before you begin. You will get answers from these tools that sound confident and are still wrong. That is normal, and learning to expect it is part of the skill. You stay in charge. The tool drafts; you decide. Keep that posture and everything else this week will make sense.

In this week

Learn. Apply. Advance.